Doing Too Many Things? Don’t Do Less, Just Don’t Do Them All Yourself

byMorganonJanuary 29, 2013

It can easily happen, especially in the Domaining world. You have a great idea for developing one of your domains, so you start building it. Next thing you know you are managing content writers, picking logos, and setting up hosting accounts. Then once the site is running you’re tech support, accounting, and sales all rolled-into one. Think you can do that with 2, 3, 10 sites? Think again.

The same applies to sales. You want to work it and promote your domains to end-users, but like most people you have a job and can’t spend all day going back-and-forth via email. Sure you may still want to run the big deals, but the opportunity for smaller deals often gets pushed to the back since time is limited.

If something isn’t working, stop doing it. I learned this lesson many times by trying things I thought would make good money, but in the end failed. However it was often from this failure that I would learn something new or pick a new direction that would then be successful. When you find that you’re doing something over and over and it is working, you’re getting results and making money, that’s when you can start to build a system.

You’re never doing too many things if the things you are doing are making money for you, but you might personally be doing too many things if you’re trying to do all those things yourself. Look at people like Richard Branson, he started over 400 companies however he doesn’t work day-to-day in any of them. Now I’m not saying you should go start 400 different companies, but know that great business moguls have pursued many different business ideas and tasked themselves not with running the day-to-day, but finding great people to run those companies.

Of course it all starts with you, and the discovery of a system. Remember, trying ten things at once when you don’t know if any are working isn’t the right way to think about it. Instead start with one thing and try to make it work, if you can, and you think you can teach someone else to do it, give it a shot and see how well you can manage another person. Some people can’t do it, they don’t trust anyone and they don’t want to, that’s fine, but if you really want to scale, you need to add more people.

Someone in the domain industry who I think knows this better than most is Gregg McNair who has done an amazing job building a variety of different businesses over the years. From fish hatcheries to real estate, and of course Domains, Gregg is great at finding amazing people and pursuing great business opportunities.

Another person who has a lot of experience with this is Shane who has done an incredible job building and scaling a business over the last 20 years. I can tell you Shane doesn’t do it himself, and he doesn’t just hire random people. Instead he’s learned how to build a great team and he can plug them into a system that he already knows works.

So next time you’re feeling overloaded, decide if you’re overloaded by too many things making you too much money, or as in so many cases, too many things that aren’t making you a dime. Drop all the stuff that’s not making you money and put your focus where the money is. As the famous Jerry Maguire quote goes, “Show me the money!”